Mashable

This week, the Israeli Defense Forces announced it was close to destroying the last tunnel in Gaza — one of Israel's stated objectives for its weeks-long offensive.

Israel has long maintained that the network of tunnels dug by Palestinian militants underneath the borders of the Gaza Strip pose a grave security threat. “It cannot be that the citizens of the state of Israel will live under the deadly threat of missiles and infiltration through tunnels,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last week.

On several occasions, militants have managed to kill Israeli soldiers after sneaking into Israel via the tunnels, which loom large in the public imagination. (One urban myth on social media in Israel, according to the Washington Post, is that Israeli children can hear shoveling beneath their beds.)

But what do the tunnels really look like?

An Israeli soldier checks a hole in the ground while looking for signs of a tunnel from Gaza to Israel on August 3, 2014 near the border with Gaza.

ILIA YEFIMOVICH/GETTY IMAGES

My guide revealed the entrance to a tunnel: a wide, concrete passageway equipped with an array of computerized pulley devices.

In 2009, I visited Gaza in the aftermath of Israel's Operation Cast Lead, a three-week conflict between Israel and Hamas militants in which more than 1,400 Palestinians were killed, many of them civilians. Three Israeli civilians and six soldiers were killed.

I arrived from Egypt through the Rafah border point, and the landscape in Gaza still resembled a set for a Hollywood movie about the apocalypse. Months after the fighting had ended, bits of mortar shells could still be found in the rubble of Gaza City.

I walked through the ruins of bombed-out homes and arrived at what looked like a row of small greenhouses. Inside one of the makeshift structures, my guide revealed the entrance to a tunnel: a wide, concrete passageway equipped with an array of computerized pulley devices.

Several concrete pillars supported the roof of the tunnel. A computer and a switch board with levers sat next to entry point of the tunnel. Tools and planks of wood gave it the appearance of a still active construction site. This was certainly more sophisticated than my childlike imagination of a gopher-like dirt hole in the ground.

An Israeli army officer walks near the entrance of a tunnel said to be used by Palestinian militants from the Gaza Strip for cross-border attacks on July 25, 2014 during an army organized tour for journalists.

Ahmad explained that this particular part of the tunnel system had been constructed as a joint venture between Hamas and a private business owner in Gaza. The business owner, who paid Hamas a fee for access, used the tunnel to bring in supplies for his factory. The military wing of Hamas used it to smuggle in rocket components.

To many Palestinians in Gaza, however, the primary objective of the tunnels, some of which are miles long, is less about military assaults and more about a connection to the outside world — a conduit through which groceries and other goods can enter the besieged Gaza Strip.

Palestinian children wait with a their families at the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and the southern Gaza Strip.

ABED DEB/PACIFIC PRESS/LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGES

One night I complimented my host on serving a delicious “Gazan” chicken kebab. My host laughed. “You like the Gazan chicken? You had it last week in Egypt — this is tunnel-chicken."

But it's not just chicken making its way through the tunnels. Everyday goods, doctors and even brides have been smuggled from Egypt through the network of tunnels into Gaza, a small strip of land that has effectively been isolated from the rest of the world since Israel and Egypt closed their borders in 2007, after Hamas took control of Gaza.

After the closure of the border points, the military wing of Hamas has fired tens of thousands of rockets into Israel. The rockets, though primitive when compared to Israel's modern weapons systems, are tailored for maximum destruction. The Iron Dome intercepts most of the rockets which would otherwise land on civilian areas in Israel.

The United Nations has long called for a lifting of the siege, suggesting that a return to Israeli-regulated border-crossings would in fact provide Israel with more supervision over goods coming in and out of the Strip.

“Before the siege, we had a moderate middle class in Gaza," explained a former Palestinian official by telephone from his home in Gaza City. "The siege empowered the gatekeepers - mainly Hamas - because so much of what we need for daily life comes through the tunnels now [illegally] instead of through the border-crossings.”

The Erez border crossing seperating Gaza and Israel is seen on the morning of July 18, 2014 near Sderot, Israel.

ANDREW BURTON/GETTY IMAGES

“Whoever controls the tunnels has the real power over all Gazans."

The official, a member of the Fatah party, a rival to Hamas, spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared reprisals.

“Whoever controls the tunnels has the real power over all Gazans," he said. "The Israelis created tunnel millionaires — an entirely new upperclass. Most are affiliated with more radical groups like Hamas and other groups the Israelis claim to hate.”

Underground commerce has indeed lines the pockets of militant groups including Hamas. Passage through the tunnels involves the payment of expensive fees, collected both in the form of an “import/export tax” by Hamas and as bribes by private owners of the tunnels.

My tour guide of the tunnel had developed a particularly cynical view of the Israel—Hamas dynamic. In his opinion, the war with the other was really a game for domestic survival that played out in each party's respective political theater.

“These two extremist governments need each other to survive,” he said.

Anna Therese Day is an award-winning independent journalist covering international conflict.